Above: 1996 and Steve Clark has decided that an 11-year run of Little America’s Cup success for Lindsay Cunningham’s Australian team has become intolerable, prompting the creation of the Duncan McLane-designed Cogito (above), a C-Class that without any further development was still faster than anything else 10 years later. ‘How high did we raise the bar? We built a pretty nice boat and we sailed it pretty well. We didn't do a Dennis [Conner] and build two boats. We didn’t build three wings, we built one complete boat. We could have spent a whole lot more! NASA wasn’t involved. We did no wind tunnel work – Lindsay did wind tunnel work. He grouses about how we spent $500,000. I say, “You built four boats. I built one”.’ While Cogito went racing at 380lb it had been 60 years since the last time someone (left) built a new wooden 110 dinghy – 910lb dry – so who better to pick up the mantle than one of the most speed-oriented sailors on the planet? Steve Clark at home with the boat he now sails more than anything else… for now
something wrong with one of her kids: he’s fine. It’s just the way he is, he doesn’t think the way other people think. All true, but I’m still getting my ass handed to me at school. I still cannot do my homework.’ He was sent to boarding school as a
teenager, which is how he met Kim; she was his sister’s roommate at a nearby all- girls’ school. ‘Her parents had a boat in Essex [Connecticut], which is where she learned to sail. They went off on the boat every weekend from May till October.’ He claims now that all she was really learning was how to go on a boat ride. ‘If a girl knows what side of the boat to sit on, and can talk like she knows how to sail, that’s usually good enough. ‘And I think that’s still a big chunk of
why sailing programmes suck; really all they’re doing is teaching kids enough about boats to talk to a CEO, or marry one. Once the girl knows how to say port and starboard and isn’t freaked out by sitting on a boat, she’s done it. What’s the point of a yacht club? Well, that’s where you’re going to meet the influential, rich guy who’s going to give you a job. It’s like the reason you learn to play golf.’ His house wasn’t like that at all, he says. ‘Ram Island, in the 1960s, you had to
build your stuff. And actually, sailing in the ’60s, you had to build stuff because Harken didn’t exist yet. There weren’t any good blocks anywhere.’ He pauses for a reverent remembrance
of the Lands’ End catalogue, which in those days was the mail-order mecca for sailing gear, before returning to the self- sufficiency theme. ‘You had to rig the boat yourself, but also you had to repair every- thing yourself. And so I would take a piece of wood, break it and repair it into a boat.’
What makes it work? The young Steve built hundreds of model sailboats. ‘My education in naval architec- ture was completely self-directed. Every boat that showed up in Yachting Maga- zine, I built a model of it,’ using what he describes as ‘Styrofoam, lead and dry cleaning bags. Quick and dirty, awful, but I tried to figure out what made it work. I put lots in the water that didn’t work, and then I’d screw around until it either started working, or broke. ‘That would go in the trash and next day I’d build another one.’ His testing location was an island pond
that ‘when the tide’s up is a pretty damn good model boat pond. There was one particular occasion when I built a three-
point hydroplane with a kite that I set off in a full southerly. It went across the salt pond at about 18kt, jumped the causeway, jumped the beach, flew across the har- bour…’ and crashed into a neighbour’s house. ‘At least it didn’t break a window,’ he adds, pausing for a brief chuckle before he asks a few rhetorical questions. ‘Why did you have to learn that? What
about that was hard to figure out?’ Like dropping a match into gasoline, ‘and it blew up; just kind of obvious, right?’ But at least in hindsight his career highlights could be seen as a series of similarly ‘obvious’ experiments. He grew into ‘a big, strong kid’, he
continues. So ‘I was expected to do things that other people can’t.’ Whenever his mother’s age and bad back got in the way of picking something up he’d take over. ‘I used to call myself her muscular shadow. I’d spend the day following Mom around, carrying stuff and spending that time with her. And that was actually wonderful.’ US Sailing’s sportsmanship trophy is
named after Steve’s father, Van Alan Clark Jr. In 2012 Steve wrote on a forum that ‘When you have a number of kids (I’m #4 of 6) you have special things you share with each kid. I was Dad’s “boat kid”.’
SEAHORSE 39
CHRISTIAN FEVRIER
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